A remote navigation system for a simple tele-presence robot with virtual reality

This paper proposes a remote navigation system for a simple tele-presence robot. In general, robot functions of tele-presence robots are limited, and visual angle of the camera on robots is narrow, so they are unsuitable to use navigation services. The proposed system overcomes the difficulty by adopting system architecture in which robots are controlled remotely via a server located in the Internet, by using well-designed virtual reality techniques for robot control and by implementing almost all robot navigation functions into the server. In this paper, we also implemented Remote Open Campus System (ROCS) as a prototype system, and by using that, we confirmed the effectiveness and usefulness of the proposed system.

[1]  Hiroshi Ishiguro,et al.  Minimum movement matters: impact of robot-mounted cameras on social telepresence , 2008, CSCW.

[2]  Brian P. Gerkey,et al.  Sharing software with ROS , 2010 .

[3]  John F. Canny,et al.  Social Tele-Embodiment: Understanding Presence , 2001, Auton. Robots.

[4]  Wolfram Burgard,et al.  Web interfaces for mobile robots in public places , 2000, IEEE Robotics Autom. Mag..

[5]  Xiaojun Wu,et al.  DAvinCi: A cloud computing framework for service robots , 2010, 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[6]  S. Michael Goza,et al.  Telerobotics on Robonaut2 , 2012 .

[7]  Brian P. Gerkey,et al.  Sharing Software with ROS [ROS Topics] , 2010, ICRA 2010.

[8]  Morgan Quigley,et al.  ROS: an open-source Robot Operating System , 2009, ICRA 2009.

[9]  Masahiko Narita,et al.  A Virtual Campus Tour Service Using Remote Control Robots on Robot Service Network Protocol , 2013, 2013 27th International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications Workshops.

[10]  Arnoud Visser,et al.  Extending Virtual Robots towards RoboCup Soccer Simulation and @Home , 2012, RoboCup.

[11]  Yuichiro Yoshikawa,et al.  Simulator platform that enables social interaction simulation — SIGVerse: SocioIntelliGenesis simulator , 2010, 2010 IEEE/SICE International Symposium on System Integration.

[12]  Takashi Suehiro,et al.  RT-middleware: distributed component middleware for RT (robot technology) , 2005, 2005 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[13]  S. Nakaoka,et al.  Choreonoid: Extensible virtual robot environment built on an integrated GUI framework , 2012, 2012 IEEE/SICE International Symposium on System Integration (SII).

[14]  Yuka Ito,et al.  An RPG-like campus tour service using remote control robots , 2013, IECON 2013 - 39th Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society.

[15]  Tomio Watanabe,et al.  InterRobot: speech-driven embodied interaction robot , 2001, Adv. Robotics.